you didn't see the comments on the 'linux for housewives' article, where everyone got worked up that non-geeks were using the very thing geeks have been advocating them to use for years (Linux), huh?
this is just par for the course;)
On a related note, ilovetypography.com really is pretty good. Ironically, my interest in typography (which might be best described as "a passing, albeit passionate one") got started when I moved to Linux and found my font rendering to be utter crap.
Maybe I don't follow politics well enough. or maybe I'm just naive. I thought Powell got the shaft by the Bush administration and quit b/c he was a good guy and didn't want any part of it.
I guess everybody else thought he was the lynchpin of deciet. Shows what i know.
I don't get it. Why does everybody hate that as part of his research he would pose a question to the general (programming) public? Can somebody explain to me how that's laziness or poor research?
Now, if Slashdot is his ONLY source, it's a different story. But I find that rather unlikely. This seems like a pretty good shot in the dark that might yield some interesting leads that he can research further.
Maybe it's just me, but exploring a wide variety of sources seems like GOOD research rather than poor.
About 3 or 4 years ago, I bought an Acer Aspire 3003. It was cheap at Circuit City, so I pulled the trigger.
For the last two years, I've dual booted Linux and XP on it (my wife can't give up Windows).
Hardware-wise, it's been suprisingly good. I had a couple problems (the touchpad buttons got a little wonky) before the warranty was up, so I got those fixed.
Since then, it's really been rock solid. The wifi is a mega pain in the butt to get working in Ubuntu (although PCLinuxOS, or rather the variant I'm using, TinyFlux, picked it up right away). I have to build ndiswrapper each time (for incomprehensible reasons, installing it via apt-get doesn't work). And let's not talk about the built-in modem. Or trying Compiz.
In any case, overall, it's been a pretty good experience. I've been afraid that the screen was going to give out or the keyboard go to crap or wahtever else happens to cheap laptops, but so far (knock on wood), I haven't had a problem.
I'd love to see what a Acer-tuned Linux laptop looks like. My experience hasn't been half bad.
mod parent up, yo.
I've got both Photoshop CS2 and Gimp 2.x on my computer at work.
I'd much rather use the Gimp than Photoshop for regular image editing. As far as UI goes, it kicks Photoshop in the jimmy.
Granted, the lack of nondestructive filter/adjustment layers and CYMK support ARE a big deal. And the fact that I can't get it to open or save a.psd natively, so our full time graphic artist gets angry about it isn't cool.
But from an everyday image editing perspective (as opposed to a professional artist perspective), Gimp kills Photoshop.
I started using the Gimp before I started using Photoshop. And since v2, I think the Gimp's UI makes a CRAPLOAD more sense than Photoshop's.
Like the Gimp, Photoshop has pallettes and image windows detached from each other. But it ALSO has a menu bar on a huge background window that has NOTHING in it. Besides a menu bar. wtg?
In the Gimp, you can dock pallettes together nicely with easily comprehensible icons. You can also do this in Illustrator and InDesign. Good luck on Photoshop. Have fun stacking them.
In the Gimp, I can alt+tab between two detached windows (my tools and my image). Despite the fact that things are detached in Photoshop, I can't alt+tab between them.
Flash 8, imho, works the way the Creative Suite products wish they could work: with a real MDI UI and nice dockable pallettes (granted, I'm comparing to CS2--I haven't tried CS3, so I can't speak to that).
In any case, I think the Gimp makes a CRAPLOAD of sense, at least from a window-manager/toolbar/menu/pallette sense. I could see why somebody might complain about the menu layout. But there's a lot of stuff hidden in Photoshop, too. Try resizing an image sometime. Hint: it's not under "image".
I ran version 1 for a while. It wasn't a bad browser, really. It rendered pages well and, unlike the pre-release versions, most Firefox extensions worked, so you could actually get some useful features in it (remapping keystrokes, etc).
The real problem was that most of the features are pretty much worthless: twitter? facebook? myspace? flickr streams?
I just don't use that crap. I blog. That's it. And you pay a price in performance for all those extra features--it just doesn't run very fast. It's not unbearably slow, just not anything like snappy.
It wasn't worth the price to me--I dumped it like a bad habit.
I'm pulling this out of butt, so take it for what it's worth:
What happened to flight sim games? When graphics got good, people realized that rather realistic flight simulators were possible. And so they went for it.
People who love flight SIMULATORS are having a field day right now.
Those of us who are a lot more interested in playing a video GAME than pretending like we're in an airplane, though, are left holding the bag--it's hard to make a dogfighting game pseudo-realistic and fun, especially when corporate knows that there's plenty of 40 year olds out there who love pretending to fly on their computers, certainly enough to pay the bills.
The last fun dogfight game I remember was Starfox 2. And it wasn't fun for that long. But at least it wasn't realistic.
Here's what doesn't make sense to me about TFA: companies who are paying per click are also measuring their ROI against their web sales. In fact, I'd be willing to be that every company over 150 employees doing e-commerce has these metrics down to a science and can tell you what they're spending on clicks vs. what they make.
Push it up over 250 employees and I'll bet somebody on their web team could tell you how people who click through tend to act once they get to their site.
This isn't hard information to track down--if you install a decent analytics package on your site and do your advertising with just a little bit of forethought you can get put this information together easily.
With that in mind, the people paying by click must know they're getting their money's worth. Because they keep doing it.
Of course, I can't really speak to 'punch the monkey' crap. I'm only really thinking about real businesses, most of whom are probably advertising with Google and other more targeted stuff. I suppose it could be different for these spray and pray types.
I didn't understand the terms "window manager" and "desktop environment" for a long time. I'd lived in the Win/OSX world so long that I didn't know that a window manager could be seperate from the OS itself.
The other day, I posted a complaint on my blog about how Adobe Premiere Elements on my work Windows box decided it doesn't have to use the same windowm manager defaults as everybody else.
My Windows-only friend was so stumped about what I was talking about that he offered me advice about how to resize the window.
It's not purposeful FUD--it's just ignorance that the two are seperable.
Unfortunately, there's nothing in Linux that compares with Foobar2000. I've looked. There's plenty of decent players (Amarok, MPD, etc, etc), and decent taggers and decent converters, but nothing that's as customizable, extensible, plug-in friendly and useful as foobar2000.
Maybe I've missed the tutorial on how to get Columns UI working with Wine. As far as I can tell, trying to use Columns UI (and thus actually enjoy using foobar) isn't much more than a good way to crash the dang thing.
Does somebody have a link to how to get it working?
Agreed. It seems to me that the issue is less that people are more impatient, and more that so much more information is available. Even 10 years ago, if you wanted to know how, for example, traffic radar worked, you either had to track down a police officer, who probably didn't understand the physics anyway, or drive over the library, go through, probably an encyclopedia to find out that it uses Doppler radar, then find a book on Doppler radio that actually gave you decent details.
If you lived outside a small town, add a half an hour to get to the library, and another 2 weeks to order the book on Doppler radar.
Today, you go to wikipedia, spend 10 minutes clicking around and call it good.
I'd be willing to guess that the overwhelming number of people who are impatient with research now simply WOULDN'T HAVE MADE THE EFFORT in the old days to find the information. I'd GUESS (maybe I should rtfa) that people are equally impatient about research. but that research is more accesible now than its ever been, so more people are doing it.
You've never actually owned your own buisness or been close to anyone who has, have you? Trust me--I grew up in a family where our income came soley from my father's entrepenurialship.
The risk is VERY real and very immediate, nothing like working for a larger, more established business.
am I reading slashdot? or Rush Limbaugh's Discussion Board for the Advancement of Police States?
If they were maliciously trying to tag the pilot w/ the laser, then sure, punish them. But if they're playing with a laser and it happened to flash across the pilot's face...I dunno--it seems extreme to me to freak out and invoke the FBI. Accidents happen--this wasn't nearly a big enough deal to be worth the fuss, let alone condemning the ruthless RadioShack Laser User Terrorists.
do people really type questions into search boxes? that always stumped me about the ask jeeves thing....who the crap really ASKED anything. I thought you just googled what you wanted to know about (or nowadays, hit the wikipedia page for it for starters).
Maybe I'm just not up on my search engine technology (or, rather, I don't know anything about it). I just don't know anybody who'd think to put a regular question into google.
you might give it a try since 9.x has come out--the rendering engine is substantially better. I've used it since 7.5 or so. 8.x was a big improvement, and the 9 series is even better. I still occasionally have problems, but the greatest problem I have has everything to do with incompetent web programming...a site I use several times a week doesn't work in Opera or FF. IE, only. ugh.
Why would you want to do this?!!! You're crazy!!! You just bought the Rolls-Royce of computers and now you're rubbing dirty slime all over it!!!
[Insert more derogatory, personal comments here]
(Sorry, I didn't see any comments typical of the crap I hear from Mac fanbois, and felt like something was missing. Oh wait, I forgot one...)
Just give your mother some time. OSX is the most intuitive OS ever. She'll figure it out and when she does, she'll love it and never go back.
(never mind the 6 months to a year where you get a phone call every other day on 'how to use this dumb thing' and gradual lack of interest your mother shows in using her computer b/c it's such a frustrating experience overall).
He's just venting the frustration natural to any new Gnome user. It's a result of wanting to change things and realizing the devs didn't think you needed to be able to change that w/o an hour of googling for which text file to edit, another half an hour of which setting to change and two more hours of figuring out how you did it wrong, how to fix it and then how to do it right.
Venting like this healthy. Let the man be, hehehe.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps your outdated browser didn't render it? :)
this is just par for the course ;)
On a related note, ilovetypography.com really is pretty good. Ironically, my interest in typography (which might be best described as "a passing, albeit passionate one") got started when I moved to Linux and found my font rendering to be utter crap.
I guess everybody else thought he was the lynchpin of deciet. Shows what i know.
Now, if Slashdot is his ONLY source, it's a different story. But I find that rather unlikely. This seems like a pretty good shot in the dark that might yield some interesting leads that he can research further.
Maybe it's just me, but exploring a wide variety of sources seems like GOOD research rather than poor.
You're confusing "exciting" with "confusing and complex and frustrating." Then again, it is 1.0 this time...
For the last two years, I've dual booted Linux and XP on it (my wife can't give up Windows).
Hardware-wise, it's been suprisingly good. I had a couple problems (the touchpad buttons got a little wonky) before the warranty was up, so I got those fixed.
Since then, it's really been rock solid. The wifi is a mega pain in the butt to get working in Ubuntu (although PCLinuxOS, or rather the variant I'm using, TinyFlux, picked it up right away). I have to build ndiswrapper each time (for incomprehensible reasons, installing it via apt-get doesn't work). And let's not talk about the built-in modem. Or trying Compiz.
In any case, overall, it's been a pretty good experience. I've been afraid that the screen was going to give out or the keyboard go to crap or wahtever else happens to cheap laptops, but so far (knock on wood), I haven't had a problem.
I'd love to see what a Acer-tuned Linux laptop looks like. My experience hasn't been half bad.
mod parent up, yo. I've got both Photoshop CS2 and Gimp 2.x on my computer at work. I'd much rather use the Gimp than Photoshop for regular image editing. As far as UI goes, it kicks Photoshop in the jimmy. Granted, the lack of nondestructive filter/adjustment layers and CYMK support ARE a big deal. And the fact that I can't get it to open or save a .psd natively, so our full time graphic artist gets angry about it isn't cool.
But from an everyday image editing perspective (as opposed to a professional artist perspective), Gimp kills Photoshop.
Like the Gimp, Photoshop has pallettes and image windows detached from each other. But it ALSO has a menu bar on a huge background window that has NOTHING in it. Besides a menu bar. wtg?
In the Gimp, you can dock pallettes together nicely with easily comprehensible icons. You can also do this in Illustrator and InDesign. Good luck on Photoshop. Have fun stacking them.
In the Gimp, I can alt+tab between two detached windows (my tools and my image). Despite the fact that things are detached in Photoshop, I can't alt+tab between them.
Flash 8, imho, works the way the Creative Suite products wish they could work: with a real MDI UI and nice dockable pallettes (granted, I'm comparing to CS2--I haven't tried CS3, so I can't speak to that).
In any case, I think the Gimp makes a CRAPLOAD of sense, at least from a window-manager/toolbar/menu/pallette sense. I could see why somebody might complain about the menu layout. But there's a lot of stuff hidden in Photoshop, too. Try resizing an image sometime. Hint: it's not under "image".
The real problem was that most of the features are pretty much worthless: twitter? facebook? myspace? flickr streams?
I just don't use that crap. I blog. That's it. And you pay a price in performance for all those extra features--it just doesn't run very fast. It's not unbearably slow, just not anything like snappy.
It wasn't worth the price to me--I dumped it like a bad habit.
mod parent up. $175 tops would be my price for a web-surfing, uber-portable applicance machine, assuming it had a rock hard battery. Bring it.
What happened to flight sim games? When graphics got good, people realized that rather realistic flight simulators were possible. And so they went for it.
People who love flight SIMULATORS are having a field day right now.
Those of us who are a lot more interested in playing a video GAME than pretending like we're in an airplane, though, are left holding the bag--it's hard to make a dogfighting game pseudo-realistic and fun, especially when corporate knows that there's plenty of 40 year olds out there who love pretending to fly on their computers, certainly enough to pay the bills.
The last fun dogfight game I remember was Starfox 2. And it wasn't fun for that long. But at least it wasn't realistic.
Push it up over 250 employees and I'll bet somebody on their web team could tell you how people who click through tend to act once they get to their site.
This isn't hard information to track down--if you install a decent analytics package on your site and do your advertising with just a little bit of forethought you can get put this information together easily.
With that in mind, the people paying by click must know they're getting their money's worth. Because they keep doing it.
Of course, I can't really speak to 'punch the monkey' crap. I'm only really thinking about real businesses, most of whom are probably advertising with Google and other more targeted stuff. I suppose it could be different for these spray and pray types.
The other day, I posted a complaint on my blog about how Adobe Premiere Elements on my work Windows box decided it doesn't have to use the same windowm manager defaults as everybody else.
My Windows-only friend was so stumped about what I was talking about that he offered me advice about how to resize the window.
It's not purposeful FUD--it's just ignorance that the two are seperable.
Maybe I've missed the tutorial on how to get Columns UI working with Wine. As far as I can tell, trying to use Columns UI (and thus actually enjoy using foobar) isn't much more than a good way to crash the dang thing.
Does somebody have a link to how to get it working?
If you lived outside a small town, add a half an hour to get to the library, and another 2 weeks to order the book on Doppler radar.
Today, you go to wikipedia, spend 10 minutes clicking around and call it good.
I'd be willing to guess that the overwhelming number of people who are impatient with research now simply WOULDN'T HAVE MADE THE EFFORT in the old days to find the information. I'd GUESS (maybe I should rtfa) that people are equally impatient about research. but that research is more accesible now than its ever been, so more people are doing it.
The risk is VERY real and very immediate, nothing like working for a larger, more established business.
mod parent up. This is exactly the kinds of solutions we need.
anybody got a torrent or mirror link for the audio? It's wicked slow with the load, right now.
am I reading slashdot? or Rush Limbaugh's Discussion Board for the Advancement of Police States? If they were maliciously trying to tag the pilot w/ the laser, then sure, punish them. But if they're playing with a laser and it happened to flash across the pilot's face...I dunno--it seems extreme to me to freak out and invoke the FBI. Accidents happen--this wasn't nearly a big enough deal to be worth the fuss, let alone condemning the ruthless RadioShack Laser User Terrorists.
do people really type questions into search boxes? that always stumped me about the ask jeeves thing....who the crap really ASKED anything. I thought you just googled what you wanted to know about (or nowadays, hit the wikipedia page for it for starters).
Maybe I'm just not up on my search engine technology (or, rather, I don't know anything about it). I just don't know anybody who'd think to put a regular question into google.
yeah, I think it's incrementally better...not scads, but certainly an improvement.
you might give it a try since 9.x has come out--the rendering engine is substantially better. I've used it since 7.5 or so. 8.x was a big improvement, and the 9 series is even better. I still occasionally have problems, but the greatest problem I have has everything to do with incompetent web programming...a site I use several times a week doesn't work in Opera or FF. IE, only. ugh.
Why would you want to do this?!!! You're crazy!!! You just bought the Rolls-Royce of computers and now you're rubbing dirty slime all over it!!! [Insert more derogatory, personal comments here] (Sorry, I didn't see any comments typical of the crap I hear from Mac fanbois, and felt like something was missing. Oh wait, I forgot one...) Just give your mother some time. OSX is the most intuitive OS ever. She'll figure it out and when she does, she'll love it and never go back. (never mind the 6 months to a year where you get a phone call every other day on 'how to use this dumb thing' and gradual lack of interest your mother shows in using her computer b/c it's such a frustrating experience overall).
He's just venting the frustration natural to any new Gnome user. It's a result of wanting to change things and realizing the devs didn't think you needed to be able to change that w/o an hour of googling for which text file to edit, another half an hour of which setting to change and two more hours of figuring out how you did it wrong, how to fix it and then how to do it right. Venting like this healthy. Let the man be, hehehe.